You Look Like Rugby
Reflexivity and the Embodied Politics of Ethnography in Sport Criminology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19220481 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jamie Crowther (0000-0001-9342-2955, Manchester Metropolitan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-10 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociology of Sport Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0741-1235 • E-ISSN: 1543-2785 |
| Publisher | Human Kinetics (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1123/ssj.2025-0118 |
| OpenAlex | W7161140433 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
Sport-based interventions in youth justice promise inclusion and behavior change, yet can enact soft discipline and social control. This article advances sport criminology by showing how a researcher’s embodied positionality co-produces these dynamics. Drawing on 18 months of embodied ethnography in a rugby intervention with justice-involved young men (16–18), I examine how my rugby-legible body shaped recognition, misrecognition, and everyday governance. Three vignettes connect sensory experience and role fluidity to surveillance, conditional participation, and aspirational bodily norms. Methodologically, I engage in and present “uncomfortable reflexivity” to reveal how carceral logics travel through bodies and spaces, with implications for ethnography and youth justice practice
Embodied cognition · Ethnography · Inclusion (mineral) · Intervention (counseling) · Politics · Psychological intervention · Reflexivity · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Sports, Gender, and Society
“Intensity, anxiety … but also, hope?” Reflections on care, whiteness, and emotions by women of color during the virocene
Personal pasts become academic presents
"Reflexive embodied empathy"
Sport and Incarceration
Why we should think some more. A response to ‘When you’re boxing you don’t think so much’
High School Rugby, the Body and the Reproduction of Hegemonic Masculinity
Participation in sport as a mechanism to transform the lives of young people within the criminal justice system
This Sporting Life
No Pain Is Sane after All
Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology
Notes on Midnight Basketball and the Cultural Politics of Recreation, Race, and At-Risk Urban Youth
The power of belonging
Reimagining rugby league’ and performative masculinities
Ethnography and the senses
Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research
Getting Personal
"Outing" the Researcher
Shoot! Can We Restart the Interview
Ethnographic reflections of the role of Global North volunteers in sport-for-development
Fear and loathing in Lesotho
An Ethnography of Pain and Injury in Professional Rugby Union
Analytic Autoethnography
Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge
A Model of Discipline
Reconsidering the vignette as method
| Highly cited | No |
|---|